World of Our Masters

I seem to have read Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers a hundred times since my emigration to America from Poland in 1980. I read it first shortly after my arrival in this country, as I was intensely educating myself in American Jewish history, and then when conceptualizing my own historical sociological studies of the adaptation of East European Jewish immigrants and their offspring outside of New York. I also read and reread the book for the courses I teach on American Jewish history, historical ethnographic methods, and historical sociology, in which I have used different fragments and different layers of this book.

World of Our Fathers is a historical study and at the same time a remarkably personal book, taking rise, as one reviewer put it, "from within the crucible of [Howe's] own past" ¹ I came to know this past and its impact on the concerns and omissions in World of Our Fathers only later, having read Howe's other works as well as studies about him and his New York intellectual milieu and, especially, his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, ² in which he accounts for the entanglement of his personal life and scholarly work.

In my reassessment of World of Our Fathers a quarter century after its publication, I make the blending of my scholarly and personal readings of this book quite explicit. This is because I recognize--the effect of a postmodern turn in the social sciences, I guess--the interactive character of knowledge, in this case, of learning and evaluating, as a product of a constructive engagement of the text by the researcher who reads into it his/her scholarly and lifeworld concerns and perspectives. In the same (moderate) postmodernist spirit I believe, too, that revealing the interpenetration of scholarly and personal concerns and perspectives makes the outcome--here, the assesment of a classic in American Jewish history by an immigrant American Jewish historian-sociologist--inescapably partial and perspectivist but more trustworthy and open to a more accurate appraisal by others.

In what follows, then, I relate subsequent readings of the book to my expanding knowledge of American Jewish history the interpretations of which by scholar specialists also changed over time, to the restructuring of my sociological sensitivites in the process of my professional Americanization and the shifting agendas in this discipline, and, as importantly, to the transformation of my own Jewish identity during the two decades since my emigration to America. Dated notes I made from my early readings of World of Our Fathers (and other studies in American Jewish history) help to reconstruct this (re)interpretive trajectory fairly accurately.

The notes from my first reading of World of Our Fathers reflect my fascination with the breathless, sparkling liveliness of Howe's narrative and the sensation of life (as it persuaded me) in the turn-of-the-last-century Lower East Side, which (I took notes from the book) "released from the constraints of [Eastern] Europe . . . took on a febrile hurry of motion and drive". ³ This sensation corresponded to my own feelings of half bewilderment, half exhilaration as a recent East European Jewish immigrant released to America a century later. Perhaps this was why Howe's narrative gripped my heart from the very beginning.

What impressed my mind was the enormous scholarship of the book, an ocean of sources--the Yiddish press, memoir literature in English and Yiddish, archival documents, historical studies, novels and plays and their reviews in English journals--amidst which the author moved as if it were his natural environment. I was intimidated but also challenged by Howe's erudition and promptly moved to read, one by one, the books, articles, labor union documents, and works of fiction listed in his bibliography. I owe to Irving Howe a good deal of my early education in American Jewish, especially East European Jewish, history.

What completely escaped my attention in the first reading of World Of Our Fathers 20 years ago was that the story of...